You are an interesting consumer. You are actually asking for more advertising in your life. Madison Avenue would love to use you in pitch meetings.
The reason why there is a problem here is that it can skew game conceptualization. Once revenue from ads influences game designers, they'll start adding uneccessary opportunities for ads to appear.
Additionally, you can expect dumb marketing people to simply plaster branding on load-time screens, interface screens, etc.
If the game company is going to make money off advertising that I'm exposed to, I'd like to see some money knocked off the price I'm paying for the game. I doubt that will happen, so I'm opposed to the game companies selling me to advertisers as a captive audience.
Activision hadn't actually taken in any revenue from the skate product branding within any releases of the game. They had agreements with the skate companies to partner with marketing efforts. The deck companies got their logos in the game, then somehow those deck companies were supposed to help promote the game externally. I didn't see much of that going on, so perhaps Activision was satisfied by the street cred those logos gave THPS and didn't push the issue.
When McDonald's entered the picture, that's when Activision started pulling in money from product placement in the THPS series.
I apologize for my soapbox rant. I know that a lot of consumers would prefer to only hear the bleatings of their fellow sheep. I'll try to do a better job of acting complacent in the future.
Yes, ads have been in video games for some time. Tony Hawk Underground, for example, contained McDonalds storefronts as paid product placement.
This type of advertising is awful. It does not add value to the consumer's experience. It takes advantage of the captive audience. It's no different than movie theaters showing commercials for shoes before a movie.
Your example of ads supporting freeware is an illustration of how advertising has traditionally worked- it pays for a service to be provided to the consumer. Think broadcast television. Ads in non-freeware software represent a money-grab by the publisher.
How do we resist this trend? Contact advertisers who use this medium and let them know that they are intruding on your personal space with their advertising. Let them know that their ad did not improve the entertainment value of the game in any way. It just created more profits for the publisher and you disapprove. Tell them that as a result you will refuse to use their product as long as they continue this practice.
Resistance is not futile. When the marketers behind the Spiderman II movie tried to put web logos on major league bases, sports fans balked and the studio scrapped the plan. Consumers must voice their disapproval if they are going to combat this deluge of advertising.
When you start with a high resolution image and compress it down, you get a much nicer resulting file. When you begin with a low-res image and try to compress it down, that's when it gets unwatchable. Compression algorithms work best when presented with a LOT of data on the frontend so there is little interpolation to be done.
Wanna test this? Jump into photoshop or Gimp and create a 72 DPI image file that's 4" by 4". Now type a 72 pt letter A in the file. Resize that file down to be 1" by 1". Now do the same thing, but start off with a 600 DPI image file that's 4" by 4". Compare the two smaller images. Notice how the one that started as 600 dpi looks smoother?
The government and military have extensive use for cryptography so an outright ban would have to exempt them otherwise it would do more harm than good.
I would really like to own a Howitzer or a Black Hawk hellicopter, but somehow the govt. is able to prohibit my use of such items while the military has free use of them.
the grandparent's reference to the movie snatch is a good illustration of profiling gone bad. If security assumes someone doesn't fit the profile of an attacker, then that is who will be used as a mule to bring a weapon onto a plane.
Ok, so you want an example of this in real life. How about that story from about a year ago where that guy walked into a city council meeting with one of the council members and was allowed to bypass security? Then inside the meeting, he pulled out a pistol and shot the guy he walked in with? Do you see how analogous it is to the example I cited from the movie, Snatch?
It makes a
LOT of sense to scruitinize an elderly person. These are people who can easily be used as mules to carry weapons on board a plane. Remember the beginning of the movie, "Snatch"? Remember how they were able to disguise themselves as old Hassidic Jews and they got the metal detector people to let them go by unsearched? The jewelry store upstairs really wished that wouldn't have happened. For security to work, everyone must be scrutinized.
But as for Homeland security, I still think it's an absolute sham. Jose Padilla's plan was to rent three or four apartments in a building, turn on the gas, then ignite remotely. The plan is well publicized. It's available to any would-be terrorist as an option. Unless all apartment buildings have their gas disabled, this will continue to be a possibility forever. The war on terror has become a rehash of the war on drugs. And we all know how successful that's been.
I think you are very well read on this topic. I am not. I can only draw upon the conversations and experiences I've had with about 8 people who claimed to suffer from chemical sensitivity.
How many other people would move to the middle of nowhere, sacrificing home, hobbies, job, life savings, friends, and family just to stay alive?
Mentally ill people do all this stuff all the time.
The guys I was friends with lived in apartments with no carpet (bare concrete floors) and no furniture other than wooden chairs. One time, this guy had a nest of wasps on his balcony. He didn't want to use a pesticide to eradicate them, so he got a big bowl of boiling water. The plan was to splash the boiling water up on the nest to kill all the wasps. Unfortunately for him, he threw the water up at the ceiling of the balcony, and it all came back down on top of him. He got 2nd degree burns all over his back.
So yeah, I know what great lengths chemically sensitive people will go to. I also understand allergies and I think they are very real. I know that progress has been made to understand gulf war syndrome and I hope that this research can better shed light on what your wife is suffering. Do you have an insurance policy that is covering her sickness?
Hey, I didn't ignore their requests. I followed them. My girlfriend followed them. Unfortunately, she forgot in the shower and used her own shampoo. It was a genuine mistake.
The grief they gave us over this mistake, however, made me think long and hard about what was really going on. In the end, I think it is a mechanism this person is using to get people to jump through hoops. I'm simply avoiding the hoops altogether.
You're talking about allergies. These are scientifically provable afflictions. They can be tested for. I have all the sympathy in the world for people with allergies.
Chemical sensitivity is different. It's not covered by any insurance company. Check the child post here that responds to your post about hypochondriacs. That guy is right on point about how all their symptoms are vague and unproveable.
I used to hang out with a couple of these guys. Total hypocondriacs. Sometimes I think it's also a power trip. Like these people feel powerless over their own lives, so they attempt to exert some kind of influence over others to placate their special needs.
I have some distant relatives who claim environmental sensitivities. I had to stay at their house for a wedding. They went nuts because my girlfriend ignored their pleas and she used her own shampoo. We solved their problem by just never visiting them again.
Seriously. When these people get in your face trying to lay a guilt trip, they're trying to control you. Ignore them.
I appreciate everyone's passion for AI-controlled physical robots. It's just a little outside our grasp right now. Perhaps the next generation of Lego Mindstorms will bring it closer to us.
For now, we have virtual robots in computer games where we can experiment with AI. In the early 80s, I used to do this in a game for the Apple ][+ called "Robot Wars". You would program your robot in assembly language and it would fight other robots with guns. The graphics were 2D top-view. It was way cool creating something and then letting it just go to see how the strategy you had concocted would fare in battle.
Now we have first-person shooter games with BOTS that people can program. In most cases, these bots play better than humans. Perhaps there could be a BOT scripting environment developed that would not give the AI unfair advantages like headshot aiming, etc.
It sure as hell took that professor a lot of words to state his problem. How about a piece of software that edits out all the unecessary typing and just presents the few snippets needed for this guy to make his point?
W didn't grow up in Houston, either
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Vive La Loafing!
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· Score: 0, Flamebait
George W Bushis actually from a wealthy suburb of Houston. He never lived in Houstonitself, and was a oil company CEO for all of one day before deciding he didn't care for it and declared bancruptcy.
You are entirely correct regarding the terrorists' impetus for launching the sept 11 attacks. Unfortunately, the unilateral attack on Iraq has worked to give terrorists an even bigger rallying call against the US. Had we been part of a real UN effort, the Islamicists would be angry at the 'west'. In the current environment, they're able to point their hatred at the United States.
This war against terrorism is frighteningly similar to the war on drugs. It's misguided and poorly implemented and doomed to be ineffective. There's all this faux tightening of security. In reality, our borders are wide open. Sure, there might be an increase in security around petroleum plants, but we'll never be able to prevent a plan like Jose Padilla's. That's the guy who was going to rent three or four apartments in a building, turn on the gas in each, then remotely ignite them. His plan was publicized and any terrorist will be able to implement it for as long as residential apartment buildings use gas.
Re:Whats next for the maker of Doom, Quake and Wol
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Life After Doom
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Is that photo really her? I also don't think she's that hot. Sort of generic.
Seth
If you can avoid having the DB recompile the query everytime it's run, then that's good for business, period. Data Dictionary, blah..blah.. yeah, repetitious queries get stored there and aren't recompiled. But in a web application, there aren't a lot of 'repetitious queries.' Think about something like Ebay, or travelocity. Yeah, the stuff on the front page is pretty static. It's probably even cached at the webserver level. But as soon as visitors start entering random crap into the search field,
repetition goes out the window.
So for web applications, put as much as you can into your stored procedures.
I've been to Oklahoma City. I can relate. In a lot of cities like OKC people are petitioning for bicycle corridors. These are trails that don't so much follow the streets that allow people north/south and east/west bicycle routes across town. But it is difficult to implement on the micro-level like what you're describing. Too bad they didn't have a pedestrian czar to oversee those city plans when they were originally crafted.
People don't want to be crammed into high density developments.
And people don't want to eat healthy foods, either. The choice, however, is to feast on Pizza for 50 years and die a bloated mess from heart disease, or live many more years eating un-fun foods with a sexy body that enables you to bang more broads. Sometimes we have to take the more difficult route as a society for the greater good.
Forcing people to live like caged animals to save the environment doesn't work.
There are hundreds of yuppies living in $300k downtown Austin lofts that would hardly call themselves caged animals. Force would never work, anyway. A community must make population density attractive. It does this with toll roads to the suburbs and cheap rail systems within the core. People get sick of paying out the ass to commute and eventually stop moving far away from the center of the city where everything is convenient.
as long as oil energy is cheaper than alternate sources, people will burn oil.
I think we both agree that there will be a time in the future that oil will not be so cheap. And it currently isn't very cheap when you consider the cost of going to war to unleash the world's second largest oil supply from UN sanctions (Iraq). So what happens when we get to that moment where oil isn't so cheap, yet our entire country is based on development that relied on cheap oil for transportation? Whoops! Our economy goes down the crapper and some other country becomes the top dog. And I bet that country will have a well-developed rail system. In fact, I'll bet you my house in downtown Austin on that prediction.
Slashdot Mirror
Did you know those vending machines shut off at 1:00 am? Or whatever the time is. I can't remember. I lived there in the 80s. Seth
the grandparent's reference to the movie snatch is a good illustration of profiling gone bad. If security assumes someone doesn't fit the profile of an attacker, then that is who will be used as a mule to bring a weapon onto a plane.
Ok, so you want an example of this in real life. How about that story from about a year ago where that guy walked into a city council meeting with one of the council members and was allowed to bypass security? Then inside the meeting, he pulled out a pistol and shot the guy he walked in with? Do you see how analogous it is to the example I cited from the movie, Snatch?
Is that photo really her? I also don't think she's that hot. Sort of generic. Seth
It's called gentrification. It happens everywhere.
I've been to Oklahoma City. I can relate. In a lot of cities like OKC people are petitioning for bicycle corridors. These are trails that don't so much follow the streets that allow people north/south and east/west bicycle routes across town. But it is difficult to implement on the micro-level like what you're describing. Too bad they didn't have a pedestrian czar to oversee those city plans when they were originally crafted.